Strolling the commercial corridor atop Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood on a recent Friday afternoon, I catch a cappella voices booming down the block: Every woman, every man, join the caravan of love …

It’s the unlikely siren song flowing from the open doors of the Punk Rock flea market. This offbeat, itinerant bazaar has been popping up here, inside a former supermarket, four times a year since 2024, filling the 20,000-sq-ft space left vacant when a Kroger-owned QFC suddenly ceased operations and moved out.

The $1 entry fee hasn’t increased since 2006, when the first Punk Rock flea market was held in an abandoned basement bar across town. After occupying 13 other locations around the city, including a former post office, a former drugstore and a former strip club, it’s now settled in its current home in Seattle’s historically queer arts epicenter.

I pay my way in with pocket change and step into a parking lot given over to dozens of booths, tables and a food-truck court. People of every age and shape mill about in the spring sunshine. Inside the building, DJ Port-a-Party slides from the Housemartins to Kermit the Frog singing The Rainbow Connection. Hundreds of shoppers and more vendors – 204 in all – engage in a bustling economy entirely of their own making. According to organizers, more than 8,000 people will pour through this weekend – a modest tally, which during December installments typically reaches into five figures.

Even a limited litany of items for sale would be too long for this article; suffice to say, the Punk Rock flea market is part renegade art gallery, part unfathomable yard sale and part curated vintage mall, overflowing with treasures and trash. Where the QFC’s produce section used to be, a woman shows artwork made from dried seaweed next to an anarchist bookseller next to a guy hawking carved wooden daggers. In the old storeroom, hundreds of Hot Wheels and action figures hang in a display reminiscent of a 1980s Toys R Us. Behind a bar that was once the deli section, volunteers serve beer and hot dogs. Every square inch of every vertical surface – and much of the floor and ceiling – has been painted, wheat-pasted, stickered and graffitied, the evolving contributions of hundreds of local artists, some commissioned, others extemporaneous. The crowd is equally spectacular, a parade of eye-boggling fashion and personal expression.

“I’m an ageing punk. I’m a weirdo,” says Ray Myzelle Bones, a regular Punk Rock flea market vendor selling lavender salts and sprays she makes on her farm outside the city. “This is a place that’s safe for neuro-spicy people. It’s also this current of community that people say we’ve lost, but we haven’t. It just lives somewhere else.”

The last 20 years have not been kind to the punks of Seattle. In that time, the US Pacific north-west’s largest metropolis morphed from low-stakes, overachieving cultural incubator to the US’s hub of neoliberal corporate capitalism. The cost of living has blown up by 78%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The city’s present status as the 12th most expensive in the world – unimaginable during Seattle’s grunge heyday – doesn’t leave much room for artists and freaks to live in the place they made famous.

The Punk Rock flea market has not only hung on for 20 years, it’s more popular than ever, seemingly galvanized by Seattleites’ acute desire for some kind of alternative economic reality. DJ Port-a-Party, aka Rob Zverina, cites the Punk Rock flea market as an example of Czech philosopher Václav Benda’s “parallel polis”, a self-contained society existing for and by itself as a mirror to the status quo.

What began as an anti-establishment endeavor has itself become the establishment, in the process deepening its community-minded values. The Punk Rock flea market operates as a non-profit that donates proceeds to Seattle’s Low Income Housing Institute and includes as employees former unhoused people. It maintains a low bar to entry to allow for maximum accessibility. Attribute this ethos of community caretaking to Josh Okrent, the Punk Rock flea market’s founding punk.

“Punk stems from a musical style, but there’s an entire worldview that transcends the music,” Okrent, a 57-year-old father of two and longtime professional non-profit fund developer, tells me. “We are punk in that we are defining our own identity. We’re not political in terms of actively resisting anything, but we are organizing to trade among ourselves in a way that refuses to recognize any other order and makes no concession.”

An anti-capitalist marketplace?

“Trading is a natural human thing,” Okrent says. “It’s been going on since way before capitalism and will continue long after capitalism is dead. All the money is being kept in the community, and that’s the objective.”

Okrent’s affable guidance has seen the Punk Rock flea market through challenging times. After the market outgrew its original location, Okrent spent years moving it to a series of spaces left vacant by previous tenants before new development turned them into sprawling condos or expensive commercial real estate, resilient like a cockroach surviving repeated disasters. During the pandemic, it took over an abandoned Bartell Drugs, at 15,000 sq ft its largest footprint at that point, thanks to a boost from the city of Seattle’s Storefronts program, which paid the market’s rent. This location was ground zero for the collision of Seattle’s homelessness and fentanyl crises, in a downtown core hollowed by Covid.

“We had these people not only living on our doorstep, but dying on our doorstep,” Okrent says.

Ruby Tuesday Romero, who attended the inaugural Punk Rock flea market as a teenager and later joined the staff, led community outreach efforts. She responded to an electrical fire started by squatters and administered Narcan to people who had overdosed.

“As someone who’d recently exited homelessness, it was a really big deal for me to be a part of that community and try to help others in that situation,” she says.

Okrent credits lessons learned and credibility gained from the Punk Rock flea market’s 18 months downtown for leading to the market’s Shangri-la on Capitol Hill. Today, the Punk Rock flea market receives funding from 4Culture, an arts granting organization of the county, and is partnered with powerful real estate development firm Hunters Capital on the lease of the old QFC.

“The building was broken into several times and was in really rough shape,” says Jill Cronauer, chief operating officer of Hunters Capital. “So one of our biggest questions was, how is anyone going to take this space and make it work?” Okrent’s business pitch to Hunters included upgrading and securing the property as well as improving public safety by bringing life and culture into the neighborhood. Cronauer and her colleagues at Hunters were persuaded enough to take on the risk of a temporary tenant. “These guys are just so talented and creative and have such an amazing volunteer team behind them that they made the space what it is today,” she says.

In a city suffering from chronic vacancies and exorbitant rents, Okrent sees Hunters as an outlier, a real estate developer genuinely aligned with community needs.

“It’s rare that I have nice things to say about landlords,” he says, “but these guys have been fantastic.”

Okrent owns the Punk Rock flea market name as a business license in Washington state, but beyond that he takes no ownership of the concept; he says a Punk Rock flea market opened in Philadelphia in 2006, concurrent but unrelated. Over the last 20 years, he’s connected with organizers in London and Berlin and hosted exchanges with folks from Reno, all of whom now operate their own versions; more unaffiliated Punk Rock flea markets have opened in Toronto, Winnipeg, New Jersey, Phoenix, Salt Lake City and elsewhere. His paid staff of 11 meets weekly to plan events year-round, such as all-ages concerts, fashion shows and raves. In the Punk Rock flea market’s anarchistic form of governance, consensus happens through argument and compromise, decisions made collectively among staff, volunteers and vendors. They’re leasing from Hunters on a six-month-by-six-month basis, with plans to stay put through next year – or whenever it makes financial sense to begin construction on the six-story mixed-use development taking the place of the old building.

“There’s no amount of money that could replace the culture that we’ve created for ourselves,” Okrent says. “At the end of the day, it’s about the people who make it happen. We like each other and we like working together, and there’s something wonderful about coming together in the challenge of this abandoned building and turning it into something beautiful – beautiful by our standards.”